Monkeyshines

Category: Scholarly Thoughts

  • Book Battle: Fathers and Sons vs Eve Green

    —

    by

    James
    in ,

    I recently read Eve Green, by Susan Fletcher, on the strength of it garnering glowing reviews and having won a major award. I was utterly underwhelmed, and looked to Amazon to see what real people thought of it. Opinion is divided: it’s either a beautiful, mysterious evocation of Wales or a dull trudge through an…

  • CEB Journal Club: Andam et al. (2010)

    —

    by

    James
    in

    Members of the Computational and Evolutionary Biology (CEB) group at the University of Manchester participate in a monthly journal club, where a paper of broad interest is discussed. Here, I briefly describe the paper and its context, and summarize our conclusions about the methodology and results presented. (I have attempted to represent the discussion and…

  • T1DBase: type 1 diabetes, and my part in its downfall

    —

    by

    James
    in ,

    Apropos of a new T1DBase publication (Burren et al. 2011) (in which I am kindly acknowledged), I thought I’d write a bit about some of the work I did there (Hulbert et al. 2007). I envisage this being the first of maybe three instalments, so before going into detail about the specific projects that I…

  • A most excellent black-and-white bear

    —

    by

    James
    in

    On the day that the Giant Panda genome is released, I was surprised to discover that the animal was unknown in Europe until 1869. The best bit is the quote by Armand David, the zoologist priest who first scientifically recorded its existence, describing it as a “most excellent black-and-white bear”.

  • Countdown Timer – JavaScript

    —

    by

    James
    in

    Countdown to Binky’s BirthdayFirst Blog Post HereChristmas: The JavaScript demonstrated here (countdown.js) can countdown to a particular date. If the date is annually recurring (e.g. a birthday), then it’ll countdown to the next occurence; if it’s a specific year (e.g. a holiday, in the vacation sense of the word), when the date has passed it’ll…

  • A Selective (Professional) Biography

    —

    by

    James
    in

    Hello world, I think it’s nice to give the code I write a bit of context, by including some autobiographical detail. I have a BSc in Maths and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, which taught me plenty of theoretical, pure maths (which has, somewhat perversely been rather useful in practice), and how to…